1. Field of Invention
This invention generally relates to systems and methods for uniformly identifying digital files.
2. Description of Related Art
High value information is frequently inaccessible to users of wireless-enabled and/or web-enabled personal digital assistants, web-enabled cell phones and the like, which are generally referred to herein as mobile information devices (MID), because this information is embedded as an e-mail attachment inaccessible to software installed on the mobile information device. Mobile information devices include handheld devices that combine computer applications with telephony and/or remote networking features. A mobile information device may be equipped with a hypertext-markup-language (HTML) or wireless access protocol (WAP) browser and/or an e-mail reader.
E-mail attachments may be in any number of file formats, such as, for example, spreadsheet, word processing, or high resolution graphical files. Software applications which can interact with the data format of the attachment file are frequently not installed on the mobile information device. Instead, these applications are installed only on a remote mobile document access server, while the attachments are stored in some repository that is accessible to the server. Therefore, the user of the mobile information device cannot easily access the information embedded in these attachments. The access server allows a remote user to fax, print, and view information stored in corporate repositories. In response to a command issued at the mobile information device, the access server can prepare the attachment for printing or faxing, and may additionally dispatch the prepared attachment to a remote location.